Where do stereotypes about Asian American men come from ?

IT IS ALL about sex and power!

That's the short answer to the question in the headline that's been tackled by scholars, social scientists, psychologists and Asian American men f-o-r-e-v-e-r.

You can write a book (a thick one) for a more comprehensive response. In fact, that has been done.

The touchy subject would be difficult to sum it up in a short video, but Filipna American journalist Cat Sandoval gives it a valiant effort in the NBC video produced for "Take Back," a five-part series on "NBC Asian America Presents...," a digital video channel that will feature original content centered around themes and voices found in Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. 

From "being nerds" to being seen as threats, negative stereotypes about Asian and Asian American men "have been perpetuated and maintained through history," according to Kevin Nadal, president of the Asian American Psychological Association.

But where did those stereotypes come from? And how has that affected how Asian American men are portrayed in Hollywood?

Yes, Hollywood is a major contributor to the stereotype, but the neutering of Asian American men began long before the silver screen and television began playing major roles in influencing our world perceptions through American pop culture.

A non-Asian friend approached me recently after reading my earlier posting about the stereotype Asian men have to confront and overcome in American society. That was not surprising because he didn't know about the stereotype, but then, he was an immigrant himself and wasn't raised in this culture.

I tried to explain to him that the Asian male stereotype was foisted upon us to dehumanize us, to make us lesser beings. It has affected our ability to move ahead in so many professions, our relationships with the opposite sex and how we deal with our own families. But most of all, that demeaning image affects how we feel about ourselves. 

Full disclosure: Yeah. I freely admit this topic is personal and for a while, I was socially crippled by that image. So, be aware, my writing is colored by that particular lens.

Alex Tizon

The late Alex Tizon, a fellow journalist, was born in the Philippines but raised in the U.S., a cultural mishmash shared by many - separated from the first-generation immigrant parents and not quite second-generation Americans. Tizon, who won a Pulitzer with the Seattle Times, wrote a book about this subject titled "Big Little Man."

Young Tizon landed in an America that saw Asian women as sexy and Asian men as sexless. ... as a young boy, everything he saw and heart taught him to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, described one reviewer. 

An interview with Tizon sheds light on all aspects of the stereotype that inspired Tizon. He had to undergo the torture of reliving the emotions and traumas he experienced as the image was hung on him like an old oversized suit.

One chapter focused on the image of Asian men displayed on television, from "Bonanza's" Hop Sing to 2 Broke Girls2 character of "a diminutive, sexless, bumbling, language-challenged restaurant owner who is a constant butt of jokes.

He admits that things are changing on TV with Hawaii 5-0's Daniel Dae Kim, and Steven Yeun in The Walking Dead. At the time of the interview, he express high hopes for Selfie with John Cho and the strong possibility that there romance would blossom between the two lead characters.

Alas, Selfie didn't even last the first season. Despite the charming and attractive leads, the sit-com couldn't overcome the weak writing and the one-joke premise of the show.

However, along came Crazy Ex-Girlfriend which features a Filipno American bro - played by Vincent Rodriguez III -  as one of the leads. By the end of the first season, he gets the girl and the show featured "The Kiss," which may be worth a chapter in the annals of Asian American cultural history.

Ama Yawson, a Huffington Post contributor, wrote about the stereotype with the intriguing title, "Asian-American Men:Hunks of Burning Loe or Wimps with Small Wieners." In her blog, she interviewed Ranier Maningding, a Filipino American who pens the popular blog The Love Life of an Asian Guy.

Yawson's take on the issue is interesting in that she sees the stereotype as a form of bullying. I think she's on to something there.

RELATED:

• 'Breakthrough' actor James Shigeta passes away
• Bruce Lee, Pacquiao deliver knockout punch to the Asian male stereotype
• The weird history of the Asian sex stereotypes
• The Kiss finally occurs on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Actor James Shigeta broke down the stereotype

Anti-miscegenation laws were drafted to prevent the marital mixing of races, usually seen as men of color and white women. The laws were originally intended to prevent black-white marriages, but they were extended to include Asian men, (or Mongol too.

White men used to beat up on Filipinos because the Filipino farmworkers of the early 20th century with their flashy zoot suits, slicked-back  hair and cologne attracted white women. In other words, the Filipinos were a threat to their manhood.

The sexy Filipino drew the ire of white men who took to raiding their farmworker homes and beating up the Filipinos. One such raid resulted in at least one shooting death in Watsonville, California Maybe the stereotype was created and nurtured in order to dismiss the threat to the masculinity of white men.

And what's the third-grader's response to a threat? You either beat him up or you begin to make fun of him. Besides calling men of color names, you emasculate them, you make up the myth about penis size, you set the attractiveness standards to benefit Europeans and anyone else -- from Africa, Asia or Native America -- as undesirable.

Maningding writes in his blog: 

The problem with being an Asian American Man is that you are stuck at a fork in the road but you've been told to stay still: while America tugs on your sense of identity and masculinity you want to push back and voice your concerns. But how do teach a group of men to SPEAK UP when they were raised to politely raise their hands? How do you untangle these robot wires and let these men feel? We may ace and code our way to a middle-class but given the open floor beneath our feet where no one is willing to see us - not Asian women,not other men, not even Asians from Asia ... It's like we're still on that railroad pounding away at the ground. This is our life.

There are signs this negative paradigm is shifting. Besides Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Alan Yang's and Aziz Ansari's Masters of None and Daniel Wu's Into the Badlands feature Asian/American leads and explores aspects of the Asian American male psyche that is not covered in CEG. Even Dr. Ken has had its moments and certainly  Steven Yeun and Daniel Dae Kim are doing their parts (for now. There is strong speculation that Yeun's badass character, Glenn Rhee, might meet his end in the first episode of the new season of The Walking Dead.)

On the movie side, Yeun is playing the male lead in another stereotype-busting role in the upcoming movie Mayhem, John Cho continues to expand his role in the Star Trek franchise and there is hope the film version of Crazy Rich Asians will show another side of the Asian male that is rarely seen by western audiences -- a romantic lead.

But these fictional characters are also being augmented by real-life Asian American men excelling in their highly visible fields from medicine and research to the political world to the culinary industry to Silicon Valley. And to be completely rounded out, more and more Asian American men are showing up in our criminal justice system (Hey, if we clamor for a more complete vision of Asian American males, then we have to own the negative facet of us, too.) 

As you can tell, a lot has been written about the subject but you don't overcome an image that took a century and a half to ingrain itself into the American consciousness in one column or a single video. It takes all of us chipping away at that image that's been weighing us down until we're seen as individuals worth taking seriously, worth admiring, worth loving. I encourage you to click on some of the links provided in this article if you want to delve deeper into the subject. 

"NBC Asian America Presents..." videos can also be watched on NBC Asian America's Facebook page, NBC News' official YouTube channel, and the NBC News app available on mobile devices, Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news and views from an AANHPI perspective, follow @DioknoEd on Twitter or at his blog Views From the Edge.

TGIF FEATURE: Director John Chu - From the streets of NYC to Hollywood's big-name studios.

BEFORE he hit the big-time, and before John Chu was picked to direct the upcoming movie adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling book "Crazy Rich Asians" and before he directed two of the sequels in the Now You See Me movie franchise, Chu could be found in New York City taping his web series The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. 

John Chu

In the accompanying video, watch Moose (Adam G. Sevani) and Camille (Alyson Stoner) shuffling delightfully down the sidewalk to a remixed Frank Sinatra in 2010’s Step Up? The dance sequence was shot in one long take.

Crazy Rich Asians will be filmed in Singapore with an all-Asian cast. Chu, who was born in Palo Alto, California, was able to counter a producer who wanted to change one of the lead characters to a Euro/American. No whitewashing here.

“[As Asian-Americans], we have a specific sensibility: We were born here, we grew up here, we watched these movies,” meaning the ones that have portrayed Asians as “others” and typically, the laughingstock, he told BuzzFeed. Chu said he grew up idolizing white characters onscreen because he didn’t relate to the few Asian characters Hollywood presented to him. “A hero that doesn’t look like you makes you want to be something else,” he said.

Crazy Rich Asians is a comedy of manners about the lavish lifestyles of the ultra-wealthy in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai, as seen through the eyes of an American-born Chinese woman meeting her Singaporean boyfriend's high-society family for the first time.

It is a heavy mantle Chu has put on his shoulders. The movie Crazy Rich Asians could be be the movie that convinces Hollywood that Americans audiences can accept multi-racial casts.

“I realize that the reason why I’ve been able to [get where I am] is because other people have fallen on the sword for me and created a path for me,” Chu explained. “So it becomes only more important as I get older, and as I progress, to open more doors for people that are behind me.”

Thank you, John Chu, for standing your ground.

###

For more news about Asian/Americans & Pacific Islanders, read AsAm News.

Pacquiao, Bruce Lee score TKOs vs. Asian American male stereotype

Manny Pacquio, left, and his hero Bruce Lee.

THERE'S A SCENE in the documentary I Am Bruce Lee, in which Manny Pacquiao expresses his idolization of Bruce Lee. As a fighter, albeit different styles, Pacquio says he tries to emulate Bruce Lee's lightning quickness and power-packed strikes. He admires Lee so much, he even had his (earlier) haircut modeled after the late martial artist.

A 2012 New York Times article further reinforced the link between Lee and Pacquiao:

(Pacquio was asked) to explain the way he fights, he settled on three words. 

“Like Bruce Lee,” he said 

Growing up in the Philippines, Pacquiao studied Lee, watching his movies on endless loops. He still often views his collector’s set. “Enter the Dragon” is his favorite. His conditioning coach, Alex Ariza, says he believes Pacquiao built his baseline movement off Lee’s template, the continual attacking, the feet drummed in and out.

“Bruce Lee jumped around and kicked his feet and shook his head and shoulders,” Ariza said. “His feet moved in concert with his hands. He could be choppy, but he was rhythmic. Manny does the same thing. It comes from that.”

In a more personal and perhaps more significant way, Pacquiao is carrying on the legacy of Bruce Lee: he is punching to the wayside the stereotype of Asian American males as meek, weak, unassertive, emasculated and invisible nonentities.

Asian American males grew up with that stereotype thrust upon us by television, movies and popular culture, Lee's emergence as a sleek fighting machine who didn't take insults or taunts from anybody was a revelation and a turning point for the denigrating image many had to endure.

In a world without strong Asian male role models, Lee's emergence was a godsend and a revelation. Suddenly, there was this charismatic, strong symbol, whom the girls swooned over and who could stand his ground and - if need be - beat up bigger opponents or rivals.

Geddes Watanabe as Long Duk Dong

With Asian American male portrayals so rare, the impact of the few that do exist is magnified in America's consciousness.

Lee's breakthrough role as Kato in the TV series Green Hornet, changed the world for Asian American boys growing up with the embarassing and demeaning images of buck-toothed, bespectacled Mickey Rooney in yellow face in Breakfast at Tiffany's. As we entered our teen years or as young adults, we were haunted by the one of the worst portrayals of Asian men: Long Duk Dong in the iconic Sixteen Candles. 

High-kicking Bruce Lee countered those images. His popularity opened the door for a spate of chop-socky films which inspired  kung-fu studios sprouting in the suburbs, all of which, in turn, gave rise to a new stereotype ... but at least a stereotype who could kick ass.

What Lee did for the baby-boomer Asian Americans, Pacquiao is doing for a new generation of Asian Americans, who are still saddled with the unassertive, not-suitable-for-management, quiet, unassuming Asian American male image still being perpetuated by popular media. Witness 2 Broke Girls' Han, the owner of the diner where most of the show takes place: He speaks in broken English, he's a short, sex-starved butt of racist innuendos and references to penis size;  or who can watch the Hangover movies without cringing when the Leslie Chow character is on screen? He, too, is neutered, repulsive and speaks broken English.

Pacquiao's popularity with entertainment figures has helped boost his acceptance and idolization among America's non-Asians and populace. He's everywhere: turn on the TV and the PacMan is on the late night talk shows; go to a Giants game and he's throwing the first pitch; here he is on an HBO reality series leading up to the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight; here he is walking to the boxing ring, smiling, waving at his fans, clearly enjoying the moment.

There are recent signs this stereotype may be on shaky ground (about time, I say) with sports figures like the NBA's Jeremy Lin and baseball's Tim Lincecum and Kolten Wong, television's John Cho on the short-lived Selfie, Randall Park as the father in Fresh Off The Boat and Daniel Dae Kim in Hawaii 5-0, but its too early to say if they signal a trend or are simply aberrations. Nevertheless, these examples are still too few to undo generations of reinforced bigotry and prejudice.

Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquio will fight on May 2.

On May 2, Pacquiao will finally meet Floyd Mayweather in the ring to determine the best pound-for-pound fighter in what has been billed as the "fight of the century." Although both fighters are past their prime, the long-anticipated meeting of the pugilists will earn both men the highest purse in fight history and will be one of the most-viewed events in modern times.  No matter the outcome of the fight, Asian American males will come out ahead of the game.

What Pacquiao has been able to do is quite remarkable. He broke through the stereotype that mass media and pop culture applied to a race and gender. He stood out as an individual - a real person: a friendly, smiling guy who loves to sing, who's deeply religious and someone who can make jokes and laugh.

Like Bruce Lee before him, Pacquiao's ascendence as a star - a popular personality excelling in a sport that stresses strength, endurance and toughness - gives America a new view of Asian males. The Filipino fighter's prominence llightens that yoke draped around the necks of Asian American men. Perhaps, Asian American boys can stop apologizing, stop being ashamed, stop wasting their energy fighting a stereotype that haunts them throughout their lives - in school, career and in the heart.

###

RELATED: 

Paquiao vs. Mayweather is boxing's Superbowl

Yay & Nay on Bruce Lee films